Medical Curiosities

Laced with a delicate (and occasionally indelicate) humour, this book is for anyone with a taste for the bizarre, the exotic and the preposterous. It is also a rich source of fascinating scientific lore and medical information: therapies involving bacon rashers, toads and other odd items; bizarre ailments such as fishy odour syndrome, priapism and colonic crunch; remarkable feats of the human body, including clearing a blockage with a snake, brandy as a cure for rabies, imaginative forms of self-immolation and the mother-to-be who gave herself a Caesarean; operations ranging from catastrophic to successful-but-totally-improvised; nightmares from the past such as quack cures, bleeding and purging, and amazing medical ideas about sex; the weird and sometimes wildly misdiagnosed symptoms produced by illnesses both physical and psychological; and the stranger cases of the medical profession, including fraudsters, fantasists, body-snatchers and those suffering from 'intellectual deficit'.